AutoAuditorium Systems Produce Videos for IBM's e-Seminar Service

There are now three
AutoAuditoriumTM Systems,
in use at IBM Watson Research
in New York state, working in rooms ranging from the 290 seat auditorium in
Yorktown Heights to a couple of small classrooms.
Each AutoAuditorium
System produces 3-camera video programs of talks, lectures and seminars
automatically, without a crew.

Most of these programs are encoded as MPEG digital recordings and are then
made available at the IBM Research laboratories around the world as part of
IBM's e-Seminar research project.
A paper published by IBM researchers at
the Multimedia Computing and Networking Conference in January 2001 said the
archive of programs then totalled 250 hours and was growing by 5-to-10
hours each week.
The addition of the third AutoAuditorium System in August
2001 helped bring the e-Seminar research project to a level of use where
people expect talks to be recorded, and those recordings are being watched,
globally, with increasing frequency.

While a few programs are still created using production crews, the vast
majority of programs are made by the AutoAuditorium Systems.
With the
addition automatic video production capabilities in some of the most
popular meeting rooms in Hawthorne and Yorktown Heights NY, the barriers of
time, schedule and distance are being attacked.
Anyone unable to be in a
particular room at a particular time now may have the option of viewing
that event as an e-Seminar telecast, either live at another New York
location through the IBM video network, or as recordings played from IBM's
VideoCharger servers at all of their Research locations.

And when a System is not being used for formal events, there are informal
uses.
For example, the AutoAuditorium System in the Hawthorne NY
auditorium is part of the "public" facilities available to employees when
the room is not reserved or after hours.
If someone wants to rehearse a
talk, they can go into the empty auditorium, plug in their laptop computer,
turn on the projector and practice.
If they bring a VHS video tape, they
can put it in the AutoAuditorium recording VCR, press the AutoAuditorium
START button on the lectern, and make a 3-camera video for review later.

Foveal Systems LLC of Madison New Jersey develops and markets the
AutoAuditorium System.

www.AutoAuditorium.com

Where does the name
FOVEAL
come from?
The fovea is the most sensitive part of the eye,
where we see with the greatest clarity.
Foveal Systems' products are based on computer vision technology,
so . . .